How to Make a Spreadsheet Audible

You have the documents. You have the spreadsheet. You have proved the money did not go where it was promised. The remaining craft problem is harder than it sounds: how do you keep people listening?

Black Box, an investigative podcast from Mississippi Today and Deep South Today, is a working answer. Mississippi expects more than $400 million in opioid settlement money. Of what has arrived so far, Mississippi Today found, less than $1 million has gone toward addiction. Roughly $124 million has been received to date. The series turns that finding into narrative without flattening it. “Some stories deserve more than a headline,” says Emily Wagster Pettus, Editor in Chief of Mississippi Today.

The first technique is sequencing. Audio moves in a fixed order; listeners cannot scan a table or skip ahead. So Black Box does not open with line items. It opens with the people who expected the settlements to change something. Listeners learn what was promised, and for whom, before a single budget arrives. The spreadsheet becomes evidence inside the story, not its opening obstacle.

The second is making the reporting audible. Findings do not arrive as frictionless revelation. Listeners hear the records requests, the document pulls, the stonewalling, the unanswered questions. That transparency builds confidence in the evidence — and tension. The effort to get an answer becomes part of the plot.

The third is collaboration. Deep investigative audio requires resources few local newsrooms hold in one place. Mississippi Today combines its reporting with Deep South Today’s production expertise — proof that ambitious narrative audio is not reserved for national outlets.

Beneath all three: audio is not text read aloud. Listeners need orientation, movement, and human stakes. Public finance becomes legible when each scene shows who decided, what was promised, where the money moved, and what followed.

The techniques are portable: people before line items, evidence in sequence, the process on tape, partners where capacity runs out. Any newsroom sitting on a damning spreadsheet has the raw material. Black Box shows the craft that makes it heard.